The Hopeless Life-cycle of Third Party APIs
A client asked us to write Xamarin.iOS application that signs in and shows 10 user connections from LinkedIn as a way to check if they want to cooperate further. LinkedIn has a working iOS SDK on their website and documentation. Shouldn’t be a problem right? Yeah, that’s not going to happen.
First thing I noticed reading documentation is that pretty much whole LinkedIn is locked behind a request form for Partner Programs. Zero data can leave LinkedIn without their permission. The approval process takes around 15 days and you need a really sensible reason written down. Which of course is not the case with a demo show-off application. So what could we do without being in the program? Not much. Sign-in the user, manage company pages and share stuff on your own page. But even the login itself has been broken and not fixed for at least 3 months.
It’s not the first time a company exposes ability to integrate with their data and services while growing, and closes it down after stabilization. Oops, why give data away for free when it can be monetized. So why does it happen again and again? Because Venture Capitalist backed companies have the need to grow as big as possible, to allow investors to have those 10x returns on their big deposits. Investors are looking for products that can synergize and create their own ecosystem. When you’re as big as Salesforce, or Facebook, or Jira, or Unity3D, companies start popping up with their only sole way of income being creating plugins for that ecosystem. This is a very comfortable position to be in, because, by creating plugins, someone else pays the money for your growth, so of course they create APIs muttering about “openness”. And when the company controls the market, it dictates the terms. But the growth of those behemoth companies is not natural, more often than not third party integrations have more profit than the company whose data they use (Is Twitter on plus yet?). The maniac craze of finding a way to get money from all those users and all this data begins. Before it flops and they won’t be able to get more money from investors due to a down round.
The lowest hanging fruit to monetize is the huge amount of data this company has (hey, Google and Facebook are doing pretty well on that front). Close the gates! Close the APIs behind 7 locks! The “openness” has boosted the companies to the billion valuation position and has outgrown it’s usefulness. Who cares about all those other companies, money and time invested to create plugins for the product.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to make behemoths into big bad baddies. Those small companies leeching data aren’t innocent either. It’s just a cost of doing business. But I would really appreciate if we could find some kind of middle ground, instead of jumping to extremes, because in the end the users and experiences suffer the consequences. Quite a few people are tired of trying new Google services, the probability of them getting taken down is high, why bother? Google’s Allo/Duo (hopefully you even heard of those) can’t live together with Hangouts, one will be taken down - it’s only a matter of time.
With the current state of things, how should we approach using new APIs?
